John
Cowper Powys was a prolific novelist, essayist, letter writer, poet and
philosopher, and a writer of enormous scope, complexity, profundity and humour.
A powerful orator, he spent over thirty years as an itinerant lecturer in the
United States, during which time he wrote his first four novels. In 1930 he
retired to up-state New York and turned to full-time writing: it was here that
he produced such masterpieces as his Autobiography, A Glastonbury
Romance and Weymouth Sands. He returned to Great Britain in 1934,
settling in North Wales in 1935, where. he wrote the historical novels Owen
Glendower and Porius, the critical studies of Rabelais and
Dostoevsky, and The Brazen Head and other inventive fantasies. Other
notable novels are Wolf Solent and Maiden Castle: all of them are
rich in characterisation, psychological analysis and evocation of place. The
Pleasures of Literature demonstrates the breadth of his literary interests,
The Meaning of Culture and In Defence of Sensuality the immediacy of
his thought.

Six
Major Novels and an Autobiography

Wolf Solent

Wolf Solent is the first of the great novels of John Cowper Powys and caused quite
a stir when it debuted in 1929, garnering praise from many of the top writers
of the day including Conrad Aiken and Theodore Dreiser. Wolf Solent has
been frequently published in Britain and America from 1929 onwards, notably in
paperback by Penguin in Britain. In it the title character returns to the
Wessex countryside, which remains steeped in mysticism and romance.

The novel is a momentous piece of work
. . . of transcendent interest and great beauty. — The New York Times Book Review

A Glastonbury Romance

"At the striking of noon on a certain Fifth
of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon
railway-station and yet beyond the deepest pools of
emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those
infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First
Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of
heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in
this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment,
a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called
magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the
soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a
third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from
London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of
all life."

Described as "the only novel
produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of
Tolstoy and Dostoyevski" by George Steiner in ‘The New Yorker’ and “The
book of the century” by Margaret Drabble in ‘The Telegraph’. John Cowper Powys
has been acclaimed by some of the greatest minds of the past century, from
Henry Miller (‘my first living idol’) to George Steiner (‘supreme in English
fiction after Hardy’) to Robertson Davies (‘a great writer’). A Glastonbury
Romance, first published in 1932, is regarded by many as his masterwork, an
epic novel of terrific cumulative force and lyrical intensity. In it, he probes
the mystical and spiritual ethos of the small English village of Glastonbury,
and the effect upon its inhabitants of a mythical tradition from the remotest
past of human history - the legend of the Grail. Powys's rich iconography
interweaves the ancient with the modern, the historical with the legendary, and
the imaginative within man with the natural world outside him to create a book
of astonishing scope and beauty.

A truly extraordinary novel. It stands out indeed
in a most astonishing way from the great mass of present-day fiction: a very
earthquake of a book, bewildering, if you like, shocking, even infuriating, yet
incontestably great.... It is a big book, an important book. — The Times

Weymouth Sands

Powys tells the story of Jobber Skald -
a large, somewhat brutish man, obsessed with the urge to kill the local magnate
of the town because of the man's contempt for the workers of the local quarry -
and his redeeming love for Perdita Wane, a young girl from the Channel Islands.
Weymouth Sands boasts a striking collection of human oddities including
a famous clown, his mad brother, a naive Latin teacher, a young philosopher,
and an abortionist.

It brings to mind the ... the romantic ferment of
the film 'Les Enfants du Paradis' or ... one of the works of J.M.W. Turner. — The Observer

Maiden Castle

At the centre of the novel is the aptly
named Dud No-man, a historical novelist widowed after a yearlong unconsummated
marriage to a woman who continues to haunt him. Inspired by pity and his own
deep loneliness, Dud takes Wizzie Ravelston, an itinerant circus performer,
into his home and heart. Their awkward yet endearing efforts to create a life
together unfold in counterpoint to the romantic and familial relationships that
sizzle and simmer in the county town of Dorchester. Yet even as the characters in
Maiden Castle struggle with the perplexities of love, desire and faith -
readjusting their sights and affections - it is the looming fortress of Maiden
Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the
course of their lives.

His sense of encompassing nature and the living
ever-present past, his power to convey curious states of mind, the beauty of
his best writing, the exciting, erotic and cosmic scenes with which he
alleviates his cosmic conceptions, could only come from a man possessed of
superlative talent, genius, or (the word is inescapable with Powys) daemon. — Times Literary Supplement

Owen Glendower

It is the year 1400, and Wales is on the
brink of a bloody revolt. At a market fair on the banks of the River Dee, a mad
rebel priest and his beautiful companion are condemned to be burned at the
stake. To their rescue rides the unlikely figure of Rhisiart, a young Oxford
scholar, whose fate will be entangled with that of Owen Glendower, the last
true Prince of Wales - a man called, at times against his will, to fulfill the
prophesied role of national redeemer. Psychologically complex, sensuous in its
language, vivid in its evocation of a period shrouded by myth, ‘Owen Glendower’
tells a compelling story of war, love, and magic.

One of the most fascinating of all historical
novels about one of the most tantalizing of historical figures. — Jan Morris

Porius

"Porius
stood upon the low square tower above the Southern Gate of Mynydd-y-Gaer, and
looked down on the wide stretching valley below." So begins one of the
most unique novels of twentieth-century literature, by one of its most
‘extraordinary, neglected geniuses,’ said Robertson Davies of John Cowper
Powys.

Powys
thought Porius his masterpiece, but because of the paper shortage after World
War II and the novel's lengthiness, he could not find a publisher for it. Only
after he cut one-third from it was it accepted. This new edition (Overlook,
2007) not only brings Porius back into print, but makes the original book at
last available to readers.

Set
in the geographic confines of Powys's own homeland of Northern Wales, Porius
takes place in the course of a mere eight October days in 499 A.D., when King
Arthur - a key character in the novel, along with Myrddin Wyllt, or Merlin -
was attempting to persuade the people of Britian to repel the barbaric Saxon
invaders. Porius, the only child of Prince Einion of Edeyrnion, is the main
character who is sent on a journey that is both historical melodrama and
satirical allegory.

A
complex novel, Porius is a mixture of mystery and philosophy on a huge
narrative scale, as if Nabokov or Pynchon tried to compress Dostoevsky into a
Ulyssean mold. Writing in The New Yorker, George Steiner has said of the
abridged Porius that it "combines [a] Shakespearean-epic sweep of
historicity with a Jamesian finesse of psychological detail and acuity.
Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, which I believe to be the American masterpiece
after Melville, is a smaller thing by comparison."

This
new, and first complete, edition of the novel substantiates both Steiner's
judgement and Powys's claim for Porius as his masterpiece.

This mythical masterpiece . . .
There is comedy, Miltonic sublimity, chaos and confusion in equal measure . . .
fit to be compared both for ambition and achievement with Ulysses. —TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Published between A Glastonbury
Romance and Maiden Castle AUTOBIOGRAPHY is a vital and uninhibited
self-portrait by one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century.
With unparalleled wit, candour, and lyricism, Powys, at the age of sixty, set
out to chronicle his life. He wrote: 'I have tried to write my life as if I
were confessing to a priest, a philosopher, and a wise old woman. I have tried
to write it as if I were going to be executed when it was finished. I have
tried to write it as if I were both God and the Devil.' AUTOBIOGRAPHY conveys
Powys's contagious excitement of his discovery of books and men and his
unceasing discovery of himself, as well as fascinating reminiscences of the
remarkable journeys, both geographic and intellectual, of his life. John Cowper
Powys's works have been described as 'the only novels produced by an English
writer that can fairly be compared to the fictions of Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky...with an immensity to which only Blake could provide a parallel in
English literature' (George Steiner, The New Yorker). His AUTOBIOGRAPHY is a
work that stands alone in autobiographical literature and is the one of the
most admired of his books.

"I touch here upon what is to me one of the profoundest philosophical
mysteries: I mean the power of the individual mind to create its own world, not
in complete independence of what is called "the objective world," but
in a steadily growing independence of the attitudes of the minds toward this
world. For what people call the objective world is really a most fluid,
flexible, malleable thing. It is like the wine of the Priestess Bacbuc in
Rabelais. It tastes differently; it is a different cosmos, to every man, woman,
and child. To analyse this "objective world is all very well, as long as
you don't forget that the power to rebuild it by emphasis and rejection is
synonymous with your being alive." P.62

"We are all in secret fighting for our sanity." P.249

"What I really feel is a sickening pity for every sentient thing,
victimized, as we all are, by the great sadist who created this world."
P.455

"If it has happened, by the will of fate, that in your life the erotic
element has not played the dominant part that it has in mine, you are at once
luckier than I have been and less lucky! You have escaped a great deal of
grotesque tragicomedy, but you have been deprived of many thrilling and
rapturous expectations and perhaps also a few paradisic fulfillments."
P.480

"Our unfortunate human nature has never been subjected to conditions quite
so anti-pathetic to all the most interesting stimuli to poetic human feeling
since the beginning of the world, as it has been subjected to in America."
P. 494-5

"I consider how my deepest impulses are neither exactly sadistic nor
masochistic or mystical or theatrical or quite sane or quite mad, that there
ought to be coined a completely new formula for what I am; and perhaps this is
true for every separate living soul." P.604

"What we do is important; but it is less important than what we feel; for
it is our feeling alone that is under the control of our will. In action we may
be weak and clumsy blunderers, or on the other hand sometimes incompetent and
sometimes competent. All this is largely beyond our control. What is not beyond
our control is our feeling about it." P.626

FABER FINDS, Faber's print-on-demand wing, have issued the first four novels by John Cowper Powys
plus the later Morwyn, Atlantis, The Brazen Head and The Inmates.

Also: Autobiography, The Meaning of Culture and In
Defence of Sensuality.

From AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by John Cowper Powys
(available in paperback from Faber Finds)

'I
touch here upon what is to me one of the profoundest philosophical mysteries: I
mean the power of the individual mind to create its own world, not in complete
independence of what is called "the objective world," but in a
steadily growing independence of the attitudes of the minds toward this world.
For what people call the objective world is really a most fluid, flexible,
malleable thing. It is like the wine of the Priestess Bacbuc in Rabelais. It
tastes differently; it is a different cosmos, to every man, woman, and child.
To analyse this "objective world is all very well, as long as you don't
forget that the power to rebuild it by emphasis and rejection is synonymous
with your being alive.’

'I
have tried to write my life as if I were confessing to a priest, a philosopher,
and a wise old woman. I have tried to write as if I were going to be executed
when it was finished. I have tried to write it as if I were both God and
Devil.'

'One
of greatest 20th-century English novelists, John Cowper Powys is also the
author of one of the greatest auobiographies ever written. Re-creating the lost
worlds of late Victorian Dorset and early 20th-century America where he lived
and worked, this mesmerisingly strange book shows Powys to be a kind of magical
shape-shifter, eluding the reader - and perhaps himself - even as he engages
the most reckless self-revelation. Read this Autobiography -
you will never forget it.'

— John Gray, author of The Soul of the Marionette

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Novels

Wood and Stone
(1915)

Rodmoor
(1916)

After My Fashion
(written 1919, published 1980)

Ducdame
(1925)

Wolf Solent
(1929)

A Glastonbury Romance (1933)

Weymouth Sands
(1934)

Jobber Skald
(edited version of the above for the UK - 1935)

Maiden Castle
(1936)

Morwyn: or The Vengeance of God (1937)

Owen Glendower
(1940)

Porius
(1951, restored text 1994, final text 2007))

The Inmates
(1952)

Atlantis
(1954)

The Brazen Head
(1956)

Up and Out
(two novellas) (1957)

Homer and the Aether (1959)

All or Nothing
(1960)

Real Wraiths
(novella, published 1974)

Two and Two
(novella, published 1974)

You and Me
(novella, published 1975)

Philosophy

The War and Culture (1914)

The Complex Vision (1920)

Psychoanalysis and Morality (1923)

The Meaning of Culture (1929)

In Defense of Sensuality (1930)

A Philosophy of Solitude (1933)

The Art of Happiness (1935)

Mortal Strife (1942)

The Art of Growing Old (1944)

In Spite of: A Philosophy for Everyone (1953)

Short stories

The Owl, The Duck, and - Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe! (1930)

Romer Mowl and Other Stories (1974)

Three Fantasies - Abertackle, Cataclysm,
Topsy-Turvy - (1985)

Literary essays and studies; essays

Visions and Revisions (1915)

Suspended Judgements (1916)

One Hundred Best Books (1916)

Dorothy Richardson (London: Joiner, 1931)

The Enjoyment of Literature (1938)
(Revised UK version: The Pleasures of Literature, 1938)

THE DORSET PROUST
Descents of Memory: The Life of John Cowper PowysBy Morine Krissdóttir (Overlook Duckworth 480pp)

It is not hard to understand why John Cowper Powys has never had the
recognition he deserves as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable
novelists. Until he was nearly sixty he earned his living as an itinerant lecturer,
much of the time in America, where he thrilled his audiences by his seeming
ability to transmit, medium-like, the inmost thoughts of the writers he loved.
For a time Powys's electrifying performance as a kind of literary magus
attracted a considerable following. His admirers included some of America's
best-known writers - Theodore Dreiser was a notable supporter, for example -
but Powys's method of 'dithyrambic analysis' never caught on. An idiosyncratic
exercise that he described as 'hollowing himself out' so he could become the
writer he was interpreting, it was too obviously adapted to the needs of the
lecture circuit and the quirks of Powys's personality to have any lasting
influence. Powys removed himself further from any kind of critical acceptance
when, in an effort to generate an income that would enable him to give up
lecturing, he published a series of self-help manuals. With titles like The Art
of Forgetting the Unpleasant and In Defence of Sensuality, these forays into
popular psychology were refreshingly unorthodox in their prescriptions for
personal happiness; but they reinforced the perception of Powys as an eccentric
figure flailing about on the outer margins of literary and academic
respectability.

In fact, respectability was never one of Powys's
goals. Both in his writing and his life he scorned conventional standards of
success and followed his own, frequently conflicting inclinations. Easily moved
by sympathy and always recklessly generous with money, he could at the same
time be extremely cunning in satisfying his own needs, which were often
strikingly bizarre or perverse. In his Autobiography (a tour de force of
shameless self-revelation that has been justly compared to Rousseau's
Confessions), Powys wrote that all his life he was pursued by fear - fear of
the world and other people but above all fear of his own manias, 'perpetual
forms of madness' that dogged him throughout much of his life. From his
earliest years Powys believed he possessed 'some obscure magical power' to
realise his desires, but many of these involved sadomasochistic fantasies which
filled him with horror and of which he was able to rid himself only after many
years of effort. Describing himself as an 'anti-narcissist' who spent his life
running away from himself, Powys escaped from his manias - which included a
loathing of spiders and a horror of his own shadow among many other besetting
anxieties - by employing 'an elaborate psycho-analytical psychi-psychiatry of
my own invention'. Tapping his head on stones and trees, praying to assorted
deities on behalf of suffering creatures human and animal, long peregrinations
with named walking sticks as his regular companions - these and other
compulsive daily rituals allowed him to forget his psychic and physical ailments
(he was plagued by ulcers and chronic constipation) and freed him to write.

Born in 1872 into a clerical family with literary
and aristocratic connections as the first of eleven children, two of whom -
Theodore and Llewelyn - also became highly original writers, Powys grew up in
the stifling gentility of a Victorian country vicarage. Yet he is in some ways
the most modern of writers, taking the dissolution of orderly society for
granted and focusing on the shifts and turns of the solitary consciousness with
an intensity reminiscent of Proust. As in Proust, Powys's central protagonists
are introverted, almost solipsistic figures, who find relief from the sense of
being 'contingent, mediocre, mortal' in sudden epiphanies, which they try to
preserve in memory. However, whereas Proust's epiphanies occur always indoors
in a self-enclosed human world, Powys's were found in the open fields and
coastal vistas of his native Dorset - a more-than-human landscape that frames
his greatest novels. In Wolf Solent and Weymouth Sands, perhaps the most
accomplished of the Wessex series of novels that includes the panoramic
Glastonbury Romance, Powys evokes the floating world of moment-to-moment
awareness as found in a collection of characters living on the edges of
society, struggling to fashion a life in which their contradictory impulses
could somehow be reconciled. The fusion of introspective analysis with an
animistic sense of the elemental background of human life which he achieves in
these books is unique in European literature.

More than most writers Powys used his memories to
create his fictions, but the greatest of these fictions was his own
personality. As Morine Krissdóttir shows in one of the most arresting literary
biographies in many years, Powys - a 'sworn hater' of dreams, which he loathed
for the revelations they contained of his only half-successfully repressed
obsessions - gave himself over to the conscious creation of a fantasy world in
which he could live as the magician he had imagined himself to be as a child.
The problem with inhabiting such a dream world, of course, is that it
unavoidably contains real people who may not be willing to act the part given
them in the fantasy-script. Powys struggled constantly with this fact, which
bedevilled his relations with the women in his life. Having made a conventional
marriage to the sister of a Cambridge friend, apparently mainly in order to
please his family, he went on to spend most of every year in America. It was
there that he met the two women he loved - the 'girl-boy' Frances Gregg, lover
of Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, with whom he began a stormy relationship in
1912, and Phyllis Plater, whom he met in 1921 and who became his lifelong
companion.

It was in his relationship with Phyllis - a slight,
nervous, intensely creative woman he called 'the T T', or 'Tiny Thin' - that
the tension between Powys's dream world and the reality of other people became
clearest. Phyllis loved the social and intellectual stimulus of big cities,
while Powys craved a sequestered existence in a peaceful rural landscape that
reminded him of his Dorset home. Krissdóttir writes that Powys viewed Phyllis
as 'his slender Welsh fairy sylph, his elemental; but elementals are designed
for dancing in the midnight air, not for washing floors'. Certainly the sylph
was Powys's own creation, a figment with only a passing resemblance to his
flesh and blood partner, who found the drudgery and isolation of life with him
- first in upstate new York, then Dorset and finally Wales, to which Powys
moved in 1935 and where he died in 1963 - hard to endure. Yet the fact remains
that the two were together for over forty years, during which Phyllis made a
profound contribution to Powys's most innovative and enduring work. In the end
Phyllis may have shaped Powys - the self-styled shaman - more than he shaped
her.

Using a mass of new material, Descents of Memory is
an inspired study of the tangled and precarious life of an absurdly neglected
writer. Unsparing in her description of his exotic array of neuroses and the
ways in which he manipulated people to sustain his dream-life, yet full of
admiration for his dauntless energy and generosity of spirit, Krissdóttir is
clearly deeply torn in her view of the man. She never doubts the extraordinary
quality of his best work. Like Powys himself, she sees his vast prose poem
Porius - one can hardly call it a novel - as in some sense the culmination of
his life's work. For the first time published in the unabridged form Powys
intended, this rambling fairy tale of the Welsh dark ages presents Powys's
mythic world of animate nature and magical transformations on an epic scale.
Written in early old age, Porius is an enchanted labyrinth reminiscent of
Finnegan's Wake. For most readers the Wessex novels offer a more accessible way
into this Dorset Proust. Seeking a sort of salvation in distilled sensation,
Powys turned to memory in an attempt to master time. Whether or not he achieved
any kind of personal redemption (Krissdóttir's biography suggests otherwise),
he came as close as any modern writer to capturing the inner flux.

THE DORSET YEAR

The Diary of John Cowper Powys

(June 1934
to June 1935)

“In books dwell all the
demons and all the angels of the human mind. It is for this reason that a
bookshop — especially a second-hand bookshop / antiquarian — is an arsenal of
explosives, an armoury of revolutions, an opium den of reaction.” — John Cowper
Powys

“She would wish that
far stranger weddings happened in the world than anything that she saw or heard
of at Madder. She needed much more than plain Madder life to interest her — some
events more like a proceeding that had happened in a book of fables that she
had once read, where a little mouse wished to be joined in holy wedlock with a
lioness, who, unluckily going out to meet her little dear before the wedding,
chanced to set her foot upon him.” — T.F. Powys

"No
sight that the human eyes can look upon is more provocative of awe than is the
night sky scattered thick with stars.” — Llewelyn Powys